Game News Obsidian to co-develop Wasteland 2 if Kickstarter reaches $2.1mil

[Outlander]

1.750.000 reached.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

Titan Quest's fixed camera worked well. So did Dungeon Siege I think, but that had a free floating one

That's the thing about incredibly bland games, everything works great down to the camera, you're just bored as fuck

if all else fails I will get on the horn for a 'hide building/ambient object graphics' button when the time comes, just like syndicate wars had

or you could do it like the sims (hear me out) where you can set whether you want to see the walls like normal once you enter a building or have them just be labelled as partition lines on the floor, or have an opacity option, or fuck, real time occlusion relative to the camera

oh no my precious immersions

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

I don't mind the NWN2/MotB/AoD camera styles. I'd prefer fixed, but still. Not really worth jumping ship over for fucks sake.

 

[skuphundaku]

Seriously 2Dfags, a modern GPU can render a 3D model in real time with far better quality than you could get with pre-rendered sprites in the late '90s. Fallout/arcanum style graphics systems are just plain obsolete.

I agree the game should be designed with a fixed camera in mind. Rotating the camera should just be an option to enjoy the scenery, not required to play the game.

Has there ever been a 3D top down game with a fixed camera? Has there been one that worked well?

The only games I can think of are a few JRPGs.

Warcraft 3?

Yeah, but Warcraft 3 was representing a stylized battlefield, without any sense of realistic scale whatsoever. In CRPGs, I don't think that such a lack of realistic scale would work. All the western CRPGs worth mentioning had realistic or, at most, almost-realistic scale: Fallout 1 & 2, Arcanum, ToEE, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, NWN 2, DA:O. That was because when you weren't in some dungeon or bunker, you were constantly going from outdoor areas to indoor areas and back, and a lack of realistic scale would have made it really jarring. That meant that the games using a 3D engine needed a mobile camera to handle the realistic scale and urban environments while still keeping the game playable.

 

[Semper]

all that butthurt because of some nitwits doin' the engine talk :D

I can't be bothered to see if this has been discussed but what would using the Onyx engine mean for a possible tool-set?

depends on the budget and the licenses of third party tools integrated within onyx. if obsidian ain't allowed to distribute them then you should burry all hopes if there ain't a kind obsidianite to replace them. i do know that onyx uses granny3d for animation (transitions) atleast in ds3 and that alone is horrible and likely a killer to all animated meshes. nwn2's electron had the same problems till obsidian did release the expotron plugin. i guess that this was against rad game tool's license because later all official links for this plugin were deleted by obsidian, even at the vault. this won't happen again therefore you won't see new animations or animated meshes if they're not replacing granny.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

scale

that's why you want to abstract out unnecessary buildings and just keep each area interesting with endzone/exit lines where they stop being interesting and you want to give the user the cue that he's transitioning to the nearest spot of interest and there's an appropriate amount of stuff in between but you're not going to bother with that, unless a random encounter happens in which case cue stock alleyway, forest clearing or desert dune map or what have you

compare fo1+2/bg2/geneforge location design and AoD location design, the latter tried to have its cake and eat it and the player's motivation to explore the city suffered for that

 

[skuphundaku]

Titan Quest's fixed camera worked well. So did Dungeon Siege I think, but that had a free floating one

That's the thing about incredibly bland games, everything works great down to the camera, you're just bored as fuck

if all else fails I will get on the horn for a 'hide building/ambient object graphics' button when the time comes, just like syndicate wars had

or you could do it like the sims (hear me out) where you can set whether you want to see the walls like normal once you enter a building or have them just be labelled as partition lines on the floor, or have an opacity option, or fuck, real time occlusion relative to the camera

oh no my precious immersions

I don't think mixing Diablo (3) and Titan Quest hack'n'slash fests and more complete RPGs like NWN2(/MotB)/DA:O is a good idea, because they employ types of gameplay that are quite different. You can't afford to change camera angles in a click fest game such as Diablo because you don't have the time. In a slower paced game (TB or even RTwP), changing the camera angle becomes acceptable because you're not constantly under pressure to react quickly.

Dungeon Siege had a camera that the player could adjust freely starting from the first game. In Dungeon Siege the reason was different: you didn't have to click the enemies for each single attack, like in Diablo or TQ. You just clicked once and the player character would attack until the enemy was dead, so the player had time freed up to do other things, like adjusting the camera.

As for all the suggestions like opacity changes and real-time occlusion, the problem is that it's not only about the PCs, but about the NPCs and, much more importantly, the enemies in combat. You would have to start stripping away the environment for all of them and the logical conclusion would be that in a densely populated environment you would have almost everything turned transparent just so that you can see everybody, which would be ridiculous. I think that this whole fixed camera thing is a bad idea.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

I think that this whole fixed camera thing is a bad idea.

dude since when did you remember anyone complaining about fallout's or icewind dale's or planescape's fixed viewpoint

are we in the same timeline here

if this is about having to design stuff on the side of the camera remember gameplay over realism and I don't think the side of fun is on having to move the camera around because a house has goodies in all four corners

 

[skuphundaku]

scale

that's why you want to abstract out unnecessary buildings and just keep each area interesting with endzone/exit lines where they stop being interesting and you want to give the user the cue that he's transitioning to the nearest spot of interest and there's an appropriate amount of stuff in between but you're not going to bother with that, unless a random encounter happens in which case cue stock alleyway, forest clearing or desert dune map or what have you

compare fo1+2/bg2/geneforge location design and AoD location design, the latter tried to have its cake and eat it and the player's motivation to explore the city suffered for that

Despite all its failings, AoD (well, the demo at least) has very nice area design. The teleportation thing is shit in an open world game such as Wasteland or Fallout 1&2, but Teron was very nicely laid out and if it weren't for the teleportation, it would have been awesome. The big locations in FO1&2 and BG2 were comparable in size and complexity to Teron (sans teleportation) so I don't see what you could abstract from Teron that couldn't be abstracted from the Hub, NCR or a distrct in Atkatla. There are two difference between AoD and the other RPGs mentioned:
1) in AoD, the FedEx quests are gone and they have been replaced with a number of side-quest based encounters: 1:0 AoD
2) in the older RPGs, the environments were much more interactive, compared to AoD's straight-jacket environment. The only interactivity I could identify in Teron's environment is the vines you can use to climb in Feng's house: 1:1

A shit location design is DA:O's main city (I don't remember its name... I think it was "Denerim" or something). That was abstracted to the main area where you could get quests and do commerce and a number of random-street-looking areas where you were constantly ambushed by enemies. That is what you get when you abstract too much and you don't try to keep it realistic either.

 

[zeitgeist]

This seems to be a perfect example of what happens when you get too much money for the kind of the game your studio is capable of making: instead of making a bigger, better game, you just make the same game, and put your buddies/people you owe favors to on fictional/superfluous positions so they can share some of that extra cash. This is how AAA budgets have been slowly getting inflated for decades now (more people->bigger budget->even more people->even bigger budget and so on), and it's pretty sad to see it happen so fast here.

 

[Brother None]

Ooh, inside information.
I am not surprised.

Don't consider it 100% officially confirmed or anything. Brian should be presenting possible camera angles and uses later. As far as I know tho', a 3D engine is just vastly more practical, even if you end up using a fixed camera and thus making it functionally 2D.

I'll ask again.

 

[skuphundaku]

I think that this whole fixed camera thing is a bad idea.

dude since when did you remember anyone complaining about fallout's or icewind dale's or planescape's fixed viewpoint

are we in the same timeline here

if this is about having to design stuff on the side of the camera remember gameplay over realism and I don't think the side of fun is on having to move the camera around because a house has goodies in all four corners

I think you weren't reading carefully enough. I wasn't saying that anyone was complaining about the fixed camera in 2D games because that's a non-issue in 2D games to begin with. I was saying that a fixed camera in a game with a 3D engine is a bad idea. You go ahead and play through a realistic area like AoD's Teron with a fixed camera and let me know how that works for you.

 

[Brayko]

I like it how this is all marketing now. No really I do.

"If you folks throw down 3.8 million BIG ONES we'll even add a special developer to give a little insight! And wait! At 4.3 million we'll even get a Game informer article and better review scores!"

 

[Alex]

Brother None
Maybe, but I still think 2D looks a hell lot better.
Edit: Real 2D, that is.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

1) in AoD, the FedEx quests are gone and they have been replaced with a number of side-quest based encounters: 1:0 AoD
2) in the older RPGs, the environments were much more interactive, compared to AoD's straight-jacket environment. The only interactivity I could identify in Teron's environment is the vines you can use to climb in Feng's house: 1:1

quest design and environmental design are not mutually exclusive

and you don't need to compromise to do well in both categories now, not after the past mistakes that we should have learned from and besides what do fetch quests have to do with scale?

abstraction = good,
cosmetic buildings that you can verily enter and explore two floors of and not have anything to do = not good

A shit location design is DA:O's main city

no need to elaborate

worst fucking city in ages

and people call da old school design and the last great bioware rpg

well I would understand a shit city if da was a dungeon crawler, because kotc didn't exactly have grand bustling towns full of urban mystery but let's take a closer look at DA:O's dungeon crawling wait how about NO HAHAHAHA fuck you thedas

 

[sgc_meltdown]

You go ahead and play through a realistic area like AoD's Teron with a fixed camera and let me know how that works for you.

if this is about having to design stuff on the side of the camera remember gameplay over realism

play through a realistic area like AoD's Teron with a fixed camera

who's not reading carefully here, how much simpler can I lay it out for you again?

AoD's Teron + Fixed Camera - realism = game with no problems, you can even use a 3d engine then shock horror

oh no, because a 'realistic' teron with a camera that I have to move around to see shit is so much better than an 'unrealistic' teron with a fixed camera that I don't have to mess with

please tell me more about the benefits of a camera that you rotate and a realistic location

is that why all the isometric games weren't immersing gamers enough and have gameplay that doesn't hold up over time

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

When a conversation becomes a back and forth between two people its either time to:

A) Shut the fuck up, nobody else cares.
B) Take it to fucking PMs, nobody else cares.

 

[skuphundaku]

You go ahead and play through a realistic area like AoD's Teron with a fixed camera and let me know how that works for you.

if this is about having to design stuff on the side of the camera remember gameplay over realism

play through a realistic area like AoD's Teron with a fixed camera

who's not reading carefully here, how much simpler can I lay it out for you again?

AoD's Teron + Fixed Camera - realism = game with no problems, you can even use a 3d engine then shock horror

oh no, because a 'realistic' teron with a camera that I have to move around to see shit is so much better than an 'unrealistic' teron with a fixed camera that I don't have to mess with

please tell me more about the benefits of a camera that you rotate and a realistic location

is that's why all the isometric games weren't immersing gamers enough and have gameplay that doesn't hold up over time

Well, what can I say more than: I prefer realistic areas with a mobile camera than unrealistic areas with a fixed camera. A large part of that is that I never had any problems getting used to adjusting the camera in games that gave me that option, thus the previous choice, for me, is reduced to: realistic areas vs. unrealistic areas, and I like realistic areas more.

EDIT: OK Twinkie, I'm done.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Or just, christ almighty...start a fucking Wasteland 2 Camera thread already ffs.

 

[skuphundaku]

While we were bickering, the WL2 piggy-bank became almost $5000 richer.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

Or just, christ almighty...start a fucking Wasteland 2 Camera thread already ffs.

What's going on, of all the shit to get annoyed with on the codex you chose a four-reply back and forth on a topic you yourself even chimed in on initially further up the page?

anxiously awaiting your response

 

[Wyrmlord]

Well, raising $2.1 million from one's own bootstraps will really convince venture capital to give them another $4 million as seed funding, and then this project will go to $6 million. Very optimistic about all of it.

 

[commie]

2.5 million...Tim Cain?

I was thinking that every 3 or 4 days now Fargo should announce another long lost hero coming on board...Boyarsky, Cain(officially mentioned, not just as part of Obsidian), Caneghem, DW Bradley, Garriott...and right at the end, in an amazing mindfuck to get countless Biowhore and Bethesda dollars; Gaider and Howard(limiting their involvement to designing the registration card)!

 

[circ]

Fuck that. BRING BACK CRANFORD.

 

[Baron]

I was thinking that every 3 or 4 days now Fargo should announce another long lost hero coming on board...

You just reminded me of the Buckaroo Banzai (PBUH) trailer